Tag: Abigail Spanberger

The prospective candidates mostly lack political experience, but they have ambition – a trait that is celebrated at Emerge Virginia, part of the Emerge America national training program for Democratic women started in California in 2002. Over the next several months of training, Copeland will help connect the trainees with party leaders, elected officials and the sprawling network of Emerge alumnae – many of whom are now positioned to help other women climb the ladder. In early 2017, Copeland received a text messagefrom Jennifer Boysko, an old friend and alumna of a previous Emerge Virginia program who was, at the time, a member of the Virginia house of delegates. She learned that Spanberger was already considering a run for Congress, so Copeland encouraged Dart and she decided to give it a go. You can’t.” After the original Year of the Woman saw a wave of glass-ceiling-smashing and barrier-breaking women were elected to Congress in 1992, progress toward gender parity essentially plateaued. Debra Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, thinks the female-led activism and momentum generated by big gains for women in the Trump era are signs that 2018 was not an outlier – but neither was it “mission accomplished”. “We had a record number of women running, but we need to see more, because we know that when women run they win at the same rate as men do.” In 2020, more women are running for president than ever before. Before 2018, the voters of Virginia’s 7th district had never elected a woman – or a Democrat – to the seat. “One of the lessons we learned in 2018 is that no matter what has historically been the case we cannot judge what voters want because we’ve now been proven wrong multiple times.” As the afternoon waned on the first day of Emerge Virginia’s candidate training, communication coach Courtney Knapp asked for a show of hands of those who had ever been told they were “too” emotional, “too” abrasive, or “too” ambitious. “We are en fuego, ladies,” High told them.